“The kitchen sink!” he tells Roberta at dinner one day. It’s just the two of them. It’s always just the two of them. “The kitchen sink! Now!”
She doesn’t even have to probe to figure out what he means. “In time you’ll know everything there is to know about yourself. Now is not that time.”
“Yes, it is!”
“Cam, this conversation is over.”
Cam feels the anger well in him and doesn’t know what to do with it, and he can’t put enough words together to take it away.
Instead it goes to his hands, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s hurling a plate across the room, then another, then another. Roberta has to duck, and now the whole world is flying dishes and silverware and glass. In an instant the guards are on him, pulling him back to his room, strapping him to the bed—something they haven’t done for over a week.
He rages for what feels like forever, but then, exhausted, he calms down. Roberta comes in. She’s bleeding. It’s just a small cut above her left eye, but it doesn’t matter how small it is. He did it. It was his fault.
Suddenly all his other emotions are overwhelmed by remorse, which he finds is even more powerful than anger.
“Broke my sister’s piggy bank,” he says in tears. “Crashed my father’s car. Badness. Badness.”
“I know you’re sorry,” Roberta says, sounding as tired as him. “I’m sorry too.” She gently takes his hand.
“You’ll be restrained until morning for your outburst,” she tells him. “Your actions have consequences.”
He nods, understanding. He wants to wipe away his tears, but he can’t, for his hands are secured to the bed. Roberta does it for him. “Well, at least we know you’re every bit as strong as we thought you’d be. They weren’t kidding when they said you were a baseball pitcher.”
Immediately Cam’s mind scans his memory for the sport. Had he played it? His mind might be disjointed and fragmented, so finding what it contains is always difficult, but it’s easy to know what memories don’t exist at all.
“Never a pitcher,” he says. “Never.”
“Of course not,” she says calmly. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
- - -
Bit by bit and day by day, as more things fall into place in Cam’s mind, he begins to realize his terrifying uniqueness. It is night now. His physical therapy has left him, for once, feeling more exhilarated than exhausted—but there was something Kenny the therapist had said. . . .
“You’re strong, but your muscle groups don’t work and play well with others.”
Cam knew it was just an offhand joke, but there was a truth to it that stuck in Cam’s craw, the way food often did. The way his throat didn’t always agree to swallow what his tongue was pushing its way.
“Eventually your body will learn the alliances it has to make with itself,” Kenny had said—as if Cam was a factory full of strike-prone workers, or worse, a clutch of slaves forced into unwanted labor.
That night Cam looks at the scars along his wrists, like hairline bracelets, visible now that the bandages have been removed. He looks down to the thick, ropy line stretching down the center of his chest, then forking left and right above his perfectly sculpted abs. Sculpted. Like a piece of marble hewn into human form—an artist’s vision of perfection. This cliffside mansion, Cam now realizes, is nothing more than a gallery, and he is the work on display. Perhaps he should feel special, but all he feels is alone.
He reaches toward his face, which he has been told not to touch. That’s when Roberta comes in. She knows he’s been taking stock of his body, having spied on him through the camera lurking in the corner of the room. She is accompanied by two guards, for they can already tell Cam’s emotions are starting to surge and threaten a tempest.
“What’s wrong, Cam?” asks Roberta. “Tell me. Find the words.”
His fingertips graze his face, which is filled with strange textures, but he’s afraid to truly feel his face, for fear that in his anger he might tear it apart.
Find the words. . . .
“Alice!” he says. “Carol! Alice!” The words are wrong, he knows they’re wrong, but they are the closest he can get to what he wants to say. All he can do is circle, circle, circle the point, lost in orbit around his own mind.
“Alice!” He points to the bathroom. “Carol!”
A guard grins knowingly, but knowing nothing. “Maybe he’s remembering old girlfriends.”
“Quiet!” snaps Roberta. “Go on, Cam.”
He closes his eyes, forcing the thought to take shape, but the only form that comes is the ridiculous shape of—